Scientists find superbugs in Delhi drinking water

A gene that makes bugs highly resistant to almost all known antibiotics has been found in bacteria in water supplies in New Delhi used by local people for drinking, washing and cooking, scientists said on Thursday.

The NDM 1 gene, which creates what some experts describe as "super superbugs", has spread to germs that cause cholera and dysentery, and is circulating freely in other bacteria in the Indian city capital of 14 million people, the researchers said.

"The inhabitants of New Delhi are continually being exposed to multidrug-resistant and NDM 1-positive bacteria", said Mark Toleman of Britain's Cardiff University School of Medicine, who published the findings in a study on Thursday.

A "substantial number" of them are consuming such bacteria on a daily basis, he told a briefing in London. "We believe we have discovered a very significant underlying source of NDM 1 in the capital city of India," he said.

NDM 1, or New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1, makes bacteria resistant to almost all antibiotics, including the most powerful class, called carbapenems.

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LA County hospitals keeping eye on 'superbug'

Health officials urged people not to panic over a drug-resistant germ present elsewhere in the country that has emerged in Los Angeles County hospitals and nursing homes.

About 350 infections of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, or CRKP, were reported over a seven-month period last year, according to a study by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Fifty-three percent of the infections came from acute care hospitals, 41 percent from long-term acute care hospitals and 6 percent from nursing homes.

The bacterium tends to strike elderly patients who often stay in facilities for an extended period of time. Infections also occur among sick patients on ventilators or who take long courses of antibiotics. Healthy people usually are not affected, according to health experts.

Since researchers did not look at how patients fared after getting infected, they did not know how many cases were fatal. They also could not tell whether patients transported the germ from a nursing home to a hospital or got infected while in the hospital.

CRKP is the latest antibiotic-resistant germ that hospitals across the United States are grappling with. Up until last year, hospitals and laboratories in the Los Angeles area never had to report cases of CRKP, which first appeared on the East Coast. Unlike other superbugs, CRKP so far has been confined to health care settings and has not spread into the community.

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